The push for complete "Fog of War" in Madden 21 CFM

[XtremeDunkz]

I really want this as a part of Madden 21 so the time to get the ball rolling for support is now.

Madden 20 is giving us a small taste of what this could look like in the future by hiding devs of Superstar and X Factor players until they play a set number of snaps, but why stop there?

Imagine loading up franchise mode and seeing no ratings. Roster decisions will be based on how players perform on the field, archetype, contract, age etc.

Heading in to the rookie draft, ALL devs are hidden until a player hits a certain snap goal. This system would actually make you play those late round picks and UDFAs rather than just cutting them when you see they are 64 overall with normal dev.

Combine these ideas with an expanded player morale and scenario engine would make a franchise feel alive for the first time in Madden. If you sync all these systems to work together, you can have a league filled with tough decisions, online or offline.

[canes21]

YES PLEASE

And give us plenty of options so those who don't want this or don't want to the extreme some of us do can play their way. I personally want it taken all of the way.

1) Give us scouts. Each organization can have their own scouting department that have varying costs and skill levels. Better scouts mean you have better reports on the draft class AND the players already in the league.

2) Give us the option to even hide the scouting department ratings. And don't make it to where the more expensive is always the best. Have some variety in there. Figure out ways to make it dynamic each CFM. One CFM could have a small scouting service that is a startup and cheap actually be elite at talent evaluation, but many players may have skipped them due to their low pricing. Other services may be stuck in their ways and continuously overrate guys that are fast or guys that are smart.

3) Allow us to even have an option to make ratings not concrete. Instead of Pat Mahomes being a 96 every single week, have something like the old consistency system where he may be a 96 this game, a 92 this game, a 97 this game, etc. Other players are more inconsistent. Combine that with the ratings actually being hidden and the scouting services having to also give you a report on not just how good they are and what their potential is, but also how consistent they are now.

4) I wish this system could be combined with a more realistic progression/regression system that followed a bell curve that had your natural outliers like guys who stay good way past 30, guys that peak real early, guys that fall off of a cliff, guys that flame out real early, guys that explode out of nowhere, etc. No more XP. Scouts make predictions on guys and you have to trust them. I want to have my scouts tell me my 1st round QB will be a starter for me soon. Then two years later come back and revise and say sorry, he's actually not looking like he will be more than a career backup. Then I trade him because the Ravens want him because their scouts say he has the tools to be a starter and we think he can still get there. Then 2 years later he becomes a top 10 QB in the league. My scouts got it wrong. He was a late bloomer. The Ravens look smart, I lost the trade in the end.

This is basically how Out of the Park can bet setup and I cannot tell you enough how real it feels, how satisfying it is to build a good team up when you had to rely on scouting reports and no hard numbers, and how fun it is to look back on transactions you made years ago. Remember that 3rd basemen you cut because your organization said he was never going to be more than a 45 out of 80(basically an average player)? Well look at him now, the Astros thought he had a chance to be something special and he is now an all-star game starter. Remember those two top pitching prospects you traded away to get that last key piece to your contending team? You were unsure of whether or not they'd reach their potential, but the White Sox thought it was 100% those two would be their 1 and 2 pitchers for years to come? Well, they never made it out of the minor leagues and you won a championship. Good trade.

I want those types of experiences to be possible in Madden. I want to draft a guy my scouting department was in love with and so was I and then see him be a failure and it became clear why he was a top 10 pick in your head and the mock draft, but you were able to get him at 18. Those other teams saw what you didn't. I want to trade away guys I thought would be nothing and see some of them become something. I want to trade away a great player for a high pick or two because I am rebuilding and then see him just nosedive off of a cliff unexpectedly meaning I basically dodged a bullet and robbed the other team without knowing it at the time.

That is the kind of stuff that makes sports so interesting to follow. Bring that to Madden!

[mestevo]

Yeah, I don't think the challenge of this is hiding the ratings, it's implementing all the different things you need to be able to make decisions on players. Everything from scouts, assistant and position coaches providing feedback and their preferences (influenced by scheme fit, chemistry and performance), etc.

That is a slippery slope of accessibility, and options can be very expensive. It's why we end up with 'scenario builder' and compared to our hopes and dreams it ends up not being anything like what we think of when it's described.

I'd expect something like this to be an incremental effort over a number of years, preceded by things like hiring your coaching staff.

[canes21]

Very true. I do wonder how good of a job EA would do with implementing a system like this. Heck, I really wonder how different the game would be each year if the suits just let the devs and creative directors do what they wanted. Would we see more additions annually? Would we see more stuff like this and see it get fleshed out through the years? That's off topic I suppose.

[Hooe]

I'm all for fog of war for development traits of all rookies (and also more dynamic growth / plateau / decline periods for a player's career), because a player's career arc is a big unknown until it happens. However, I do not see any benefit for fog of war for player ratings.

First off, fog of war for player ratings isn't "sim". Football scouts quantify literally everything about a football player - not just his 40 time and other measurables, but more qualitative things such as arm strength, pass accuracy, ability in zone coverage, etc. etc. are ultimately given a numeric value. Notably, the biggest scouting agencies which the vast majority of NFL teams use for their draft scouting data (National, BLESTO) do this. Effectively, scouts create and change ratings for the real life athletes, just as Madden does. If you want an authentic NFL football team-building experience, you should use player ratings.

Fog of war for player ratings also doesn't really work well with the current infrastructure of Madden. As Mestevo went over, there is no effective player evaluation tool in the game to replace the current tool we use to evaluate players, that being their ratings. Hiding the player ratings without a replacement evaluation method actively harms the user's gameplay experience in the mode. As for any replacement mechanics, I also honestly don't really want to have to run extensive OTAs / minicamps / whatever just to figure out what my players might be good at on an imperfect and anecdotal level. It's hard enough for me to make time to power through even a single season of a franchise as-is, and putting more significant time-sink activities between me and winning actual games is not going to help that.

Finally, fog of war for player ratings isn't necessary. Player ratings as they exist today don't guarantee performance on the field. There's a thread on this forum every year about players in the game who "play above their ratings", and I'm sure we could talk about players who play below their ratings for us as well. To that end, there's already a level of uncertainty about player performance baked into the game we already have.

I do want to see things like scouting / coaching staffs / etc. mechanically expanded in future Madden games, but I don't think hiding player ratings should be included in this expansion. I don't really care for ratings fog of war being added as an option either. I think using player ratings is a fundamental and valuable piece of the Madden franchise mode experience, and also I'd rather Tiburon spend their development time building something else more beneficial for the mode. I think the mode is actively harmed if they are removed.

To offer an alternative, I think a better investment would be providing users better player evaluation tools which present more relevant information faster and moving away from the roster spreadsheet UI. I particularly like how MLB The Show presents player ratings information, and NBA 2K also does an alright job. Most EA Sports games still use spreadsheets, and I really would like to see them try something else here because the spreadsheets are dense, present too much irrelevant information to make easy comparisons, and are visually boring.

[Shosum13]

Quote: Originally Posted by XtremeDunkz

I really want this as a part of Madden 21 so the time to get the ball rolling for support is now. Madden 20 is giving us a small taste of what this could look like in the future by hiding devs of Superstar and X Factor players until they play a set number of snaps, but why stop there? Imagine loading up franchise mode and seeing no ratings. Roster decisions will be based on how players perform on the field, archetype, contract, age etc. Heading in to the rookie draft, ALL devs are hidden until a player hits a certain snap goal. This system would actually make you play those late round picks and UDFAs rather than just cutting them when you see they are 64 overall with normal dev. Combine these ideas with an expanded player morale and scenario engine would make a franchise feel alive for the first time in Madden. If you sync all these systems to work together, you can have a league filled with tough decisions, online or offline.

I would love this, I want all dev traits hidden for rookies. It would definitely bring a new level of strategy to how you deal with rookies. On top of this I would really like to see a whole new scouting system. Why do we only get the top 3 traits, we should have to scout a player until we unveil all of their traits in the form of letter grades. Then the accuracy of the given letter grades should depend on the quality of your scouting team.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

[Sucram7777]

You just tell me where to sign and I'll BE THERE.

They had a dim shadow of this in Madden 12 with the Generated Rookies, and I loved the idea.

[coach422001]

I think CM Hooe expressed my concerns about hiding player ratings across the current NFL player pool. In Fifa, you have to have your scouts scout players in your own league to unlock ratings which I can't stand...I find it hard to believe that a professional EU football club doesn't know everything about the veteran players in their league. The scouting is useful for finding players in leagues that you don't see every week, but in the NFL we would expect to know all these attributes for players who have been in the league. For rookies, there are a number of things that should be well known through college scouting and combines. Where I really would like to see the use of the 'unknown' is what is that actual potential that player may reach and it also include these dev traits, and based on your scouting system (still needs to be implemented) you may have an estimated potential range, that may or may not come to fruition. if you drafted Ryan Leaf over Peyton Manning, over time you may come to find that though you knew his skills, his dev traits and his cap on potential actually proves that you made a bad draft.

The problem with Madden 12 to me was that although they tried to do this, once you put a player into the depth chart, you saw what his starting rating was going to be. So in the depth chart the OVR you saw when he wasn't slotted may be a 77?, when you put him into a depth chart slot, he may show up as a 46?...and that number is what his OVR ends up being when all the pre-season work is done. What you did find out at the end is whether that player had an A-F development potential. I would love to have scouting matter for rookies, and the ability of your scout to provide you accurate information, and for players who play have the chance to improve their potential or traits with training and performance. But I'd have a hard time having to uncover ratings of Jimmy Garafolo, or Pharoh Cooper, when I've seen them in the league for several years.